The Jitterbug
by John Bigboote
Summary: Lenne should have used bug spray.


" _NEVER SHOULD HAVE COME HERE."_

\- Skyrim NPC

" _LAST MISTAKE."_

\- another Skyrim NPC

* * *

MAYBE coming to Vegnagun's silo with nothing but the miniskirt and the ruffled hula blouse on her back was a mistake. Lenne's Songstress attire was great for entertaining the masses and performing complex summoning rituals from a safe distance, but it left her more than a little outmatched in a one-on-one duel with a colossal insectoid doomsday weapon.

All she could rely on was the survival training she'd honed for months in the Zanarkand military. She rolled under Vegnagun's legs as they each tried to trample her, skewer her, or slice her in half. She jumped backwards when its tail scythe came swinging towards her. She was dodging everything thrown at her with a series of twirls and flips that barely kept up with the Machina's frantic attacks. Her movements could have been interpreted as either an energetic dance routine or a desperate fight for her life.

Shuyin was a few outfielders short of a full blitzball team, and he wasn't about to stop in the name of love before he broke Lenne's heart. Hopelessness had driven him to flee from the peaceful confines of Zanarkand and infiltrate the deadly territory of Bevelle. Fear and anguish had possessed him as he hijacked Bevelle's top secret weapon and plotted to turn it against its creators. He didn't have the first clue about what he was piloting, but it didn't matter. He was willing to do anything.

His shaking hands scraped across the Machina's digital harpsichord keys as if he were frantically clawing out of his own grave. Consumed by madness, his mind couldn't fully grasp that the little blue bouncing thing flickering in the pixels of Vegnagun's targeting screen was the very woman he had come here to save.

" _Give up, Lenne!"_ his voice boomed from Vegnagun's mandible horns with crackling stereo distortion. His words were interspersed with short fits of tormented laughter. " _The only way we'll be together is if I end the war with this thing!_ "

"I can't let you do this, Shuyin! You're just going to make everything worse!" Lenne screamed toward Vegnagun's head. She narrowly dodged being slashed by another one of its gigantic exoskeleton legs.

Shuyin was gaining a mastery over Vegnagun's controls in each passing second. Or maybe the terrible forces that powered the Machina were gaining a mastery over him. He instinctively changed octaves on the keyboard, and options for Vegnagun's multiple firing modes appeared over the glowing dais. One setting was labeled with the outline of a globe crossed out with a red circle. Another setting was labeled with the outline of a continent crossed out in red. A third setting was labeled with the outline of a Songstress in a cute pose crossed out in red.

This unholy creation had been built for Bevelle's war against Zanarkand. Of course it came equipped specifically for fighting the most likely enemies it would meet on the frontlines.

Shuyin's hands frantically played the tone sequence that activated Vegnagun's Anti-Songstress mode. The circle of runes on its mouth cannon shifted their panels until they tapered into a narrow point with several stinger-like barrels. He ignored the more complex multi-targeting features and focused on a single image on the aiming dais.

His face changed to a maniacal smile as he slammed his fingers across the control keyboard. His eyes bulged and twitched as he obsessively stared at the screen. X and Y coordinates locked on Lenne's tiny dancing figure and magnified the image in once. The coordinates locked on to her torso and zoomed in again. They locked on to her waist and zoomed in again.

Shuyin couldn't contain his demented cackling. Now they would be together. Now he'd save her, even if she didn't want to be saved. He just needed a clear line of sight at the spot where he'd deliver her salvation. The pale blue curtain hanging off of her blouse mostly covered the front of her waist, but every now and then he'd almost see the magnified flash of a belly button as she dodged and twirled across the screen.

The targeting reticule locked the instant the curtain breezed out of the way and Lenne's midriff became completely exposed. Shuyin's fingers pounced on the control keys and inputted the firing command.

A pill-sized metal cartridge burst from Vegnagun's cannon bore, whistled toward its target in a spiral path, and became implanted in the natural receptacle formed by Lenne's navel.

Lenne instantly dropped to the cold silo floor like a fat opera singer trapped in a skinny athletic body, paralyzed by the sudden rush of stinging pain and ticklishness convulsing through her stomach. The slug in her gut felt less like a bullet and more like an actual living slug with millions of quivering muscles, releasing its weak anesthetic toxins as it burrowed through her flesh on a tiny power drill. She held her aching midriff as she rolled to her side groaning. A small stream of blood trickled from her new piercing.

Vegnagun angled its cannon so it was pointed straight up in the air. It launched a single missile that exploded near the roof of the silo and descended around Lenne in a cascade of bright blue glitter. The particles made her body more electrically conductive as they settled over her.

Fuzzy electronic numbness swelled in Lenne's gut and started to creep through the rest of her senses. Vegnagun aligned its antennae with the cloud of illuminated static engulfing her. Tiny currents of lightning crackled around the bare portions of her shoulders, legs, and stomach as her groans subsided. Electronic signals spread out from the node installed in her belly and reached her brain, rapidly overpowering her will at the neural level. The implant calibrated itself to the harmonic frequencies of her body as it integrated with her own summoner energies.

Someone once Autotuned the DK Rap to match up with Bohemian Rhapsody. Lenne was being Autotuned to match up with Vegnagun's principles of destruction and annihilation.

Lenne's legs twitched in resistance for a few seconds before she became completely still. She stayed quiet when she started to move again and gradually rose back to her feet. She turned toward Vegnagun with a posture that was solemn and eerie, if not still relatively graceful. She stared toward her beloved hundreds of feet above her with a smile that was just as deranged as his.

Two red dots glowed steadily in the center of her pupils. A third red dot was tucked inside the shadow of her navel. Markings resembling discolored butterfly wings were tattooed around the spot where the Vegnagun had implanted its transponder. Pale black scars zig-zagged up the sides of her face as a result of the electrodes surging through her veins.

Shuyin held his arms still as he hung his head over the keyboard. His madness was absolute, but his desperation and rage were subsiding. He had nothing to worry about now that his Angel of Music had gotten her wings clipped.

The silo's spotlights abruptly burst on and lit up the launch platform like stage lights around a circular arena. The sound of urgent footsteps and clattering metal echoed through the acoustics of the entranceway Shuyin had snuck past a few minutes ago.

Oh, right. The guards. He'd gotten so carried away over Lenne that he almost forgot about them.

A dozen plus soldiers in battle armor and riot helmets charged onto the platform and pointed a wall of machine guns at the first thing in their path. Lenne remained rather cheerful despite her outnumbered and seemingly inescapable predicament. Most people would have seen this as their mortal end and accepted their fate. She saw it as the perfect opportunity to give her Vegnabuns a workout.

She began by diving through a hail of tracer rounds like a fly quickly weaving through the snare of a spider's web. As soon as the troopers were in her reach, she stood on her hands and toppled several of them by performing a graceful helicopter kick. She balanced back onto her boots and not-so-gracefully shattered one guard's arm in three different places with a vicious armlock. She twisted the rifle out of his grasp and used it to make a fine _Sonnii de la Korleon_ out of the rest of his buddies.

She tossed away the gun and the corpses of the Bevelle soldiers when she was done with them. She stood in the center of grisly carnage under the glare of the silo's lights, becoming a silhouette with three red flickering dots as the gargantuan horned face of her Machina master loomed behind her.

Lenne and Shuyin's dream of love had been corrupted into a nightmare of horror. They were finally together, united as Vegnagun's pilot and guardian for all time.

* * *

1,000 years later, a certain trio of explorers had their own confrontation with Vegnagun. Paine held her sword high and prepared to attack the creature's head with all the strength of her Warrior Dressphere. Rikku twirled her daggers and got ready to sprint under its legs with all the speed of her Thief Dressphere. Yuna calmly stood between them and focused the support magic of her Songstress Dressphere.

But then the ruffles of Yuna's costume began to glow, interrupting her concentration and replacing it with confusion. The strange effect swept outward in bright blue waves and began to spread to Rikku's and Paine's equipment. They underwent an automatic Sphere Change that dissolved their weapons and changed them both into their more frilly but less physically enabled Songstress forms. The three stopped everything they were doing and spent several seconds exchanging awkward looks and blinking.

"Hey. Why is your Dress-thingy messing around with our Dress-thingies?" Rikku asked with eloquent technical mastery of everything she was saying.

"Hmph," the linguistically talented Paine added.

"I don't know. It's like it just has a mind of its own," Yuna replied in disbelief. If only she had noticed the dim ghostly outline of a figure with a butterfly midriff tattoo and a demented grin hovering in the cloud of Sphere energy behind her.

Vegnagun's parasitization functions were triggered as soon as three Songstresses were standing in front of it. Its cannon quietly loaded the special ammunition and locked on to the line of vulnerable bellies prepared for infestation. It made the final adjustments in its crosshairs while the Gullwings were bantering about their malfunctioning Dresspheres, having no idea they were about to get weirder than Ariana Grande in an experimental sci-fi music video.

Vegnagun fired three doses of Songstress-subduing medicine in a single coordinated shot. Tiny black projectiles buzzed through the air for a split second before meeting their destinations. Slender abdominal muscles tensed and flinched in surprise as three shrill voices made a distinctive "Eek!" sound.

* * *

 _Author's note: I've been trying to come up with ideas for another nice fluffy Mipha fanfic. I couldn't get anywhere, but I came up with this demented Lenne fanfic. That's kinda similar I guess._

 _Author's note 2: You guys wanna chill out and watch Panzer World Galient some weekend?_


End file.
